Fat Spreading: or How to Eat Your Problems

by Ryan Johann Perry

Binge Eating Disorder is a new disease that has come to the forefront as our medical and academic community gets increasingly bored. According to a recent commercial being played ad nauseum, B.E.D. is an issue that affects U.S. citizens at a shocking rate of 0.8 percent of adult males and 1.6 percent of adult females. Prior to B.E.D., “glandular problem” was the 20th century go-to reason for fatties, but now when we see an obese person cruising a Jazzy Scooter, we must consider the possibility that they are suffering from this horrible, all-American disease. However, we must also consider what accounts for the other 98.6 percent of big people, and the answer is quite simple: a new movement called Fat Spreading.

Like “Manspreading”, in which a man who sits with his legs apart is reinforcing both his chauvinistic, phallic worldview and his indoctrination of the patriarchy, Fat Spreading is a subconsciously purposeful act, in which bovine men and women eat themselves into grotesque proportions as rebellion against the oppressive programming that is breeding, sexual desire, and non-roman life spans. Expanding their stomachs to third trimester proportions, they illuminate a parallel between eating three hamburgers in one sitting and having a child.

Their weapon is the Internet, both for convenience, reach and ability to not have to walk anywhere. They make big, bold and beautiful, unashamed all-cap statements such as “fuck your beauty standards” while mocking sad men and women at gyms working to maintain full functionality of their body. Fat Spreaders hearken back to an earlier purer age of blood-letting and witch burning, when these curvaceous beauties were the muse of many artists. Think of all the Da Vinci paintings of women so endowed they could not walk, the sculptures that showed men and women as large beasts of flesh. Sadly, these great artists are no more and Fat Spreaders are forced to take neck-up selfies of themselves, refining their own photographic eye, becoming their own muse.

Fat Spreading women have a new call sign: Goddess. Gone are the pixies with low body fat and efficient cardiovascular systems. Fat Spreading embraces the slow, mud-like slog of women unashamed to use couch upholstery to dress themselves, who show that selfies of beautiful women are a Dorian Gray-like solipsism that needs to be eradicated. By simply reshaping their natural curves into a gelatinous mass of sweaty folded skin and fat, they successfully escape the oppressive eye of perverted, sexist men and the health/beauty standards of our sheep-like society.

Your disgust in these “fat asses” is a mirror of their disgust in your modern lifestyle.

Shallow western culture cannot comprehend Fat Spreaders ability to 'own it', their body image, their mentality, their personal space and yours. It is this self actualization that gives Fat Spreaders their power. While many view civil disobedience and picketing as effective methods of implementing change, Fat Spreaders have shown these as futile enterprises. Through gastronomy alone, Fat Spreaders have forced change by having Disneyland widen their seats, Walmart to offer motorized shopping and McDonalds to offer Breakfast All Day. In less than a decade in America, Fat Spreading has done more by subverting the ADA act than any manifesto or sit-in ever could, they have changed society to accommodate them.

Fat Spreaders make in-your-face statements. With raised middle fingers they state their desire to make themselves completely undesirable, unhygienic and immobile. Gone are hunger strikes utilized by skinny Irishmen and prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, or million man/women marches on Washington, D.C. The new paradigm is forcing heroic doses of calories down their throats, eating hearty portions of Cheese Wiz, mocking the diseased capitalistic ideas of work ethic and general good health. Fat Spreaders are a full affront on the classic American, Norman Rockwell lifestyle. These brave rebels become Kings and Queens on scooters, subverting our institutions and academia by earning disability, special access, VIP sitting, emotional protection and unfettered television watching.

Fat Spreading methodology forces us to look back and judge the efficacy of past political movements. We have to ask whether Martin Luther King Jr. took the marathon route when he could have easily doubled his intake of soul food, wore sweatpants and, like Black Lives Matter- style direct action, screamed at students studying in libraries and fabricated racial slurs to build sympathy rather than his stoic, proud civil disobedience. How would the outcome of the civil rights movement been different?

Fat Spreading is nothing short of the greatest political movement of the 21st century, on par with the Bolshevik Revolution and Anti-War protestations of the last century. What makes it all the more powerful is their use of Capitalism's greatest weapon, consumption, against the system itself. They are fighting fire with fire. Fat Spreaders do not need to yell chants and post hashtags, kowtowing the media, they simply eat second and third helpings. By doing this, Fat Spreaders make themselves seen, and make your vision obscured, reveal your ability to walk down aisle five as something we have taken for granted all along. Fat Spreaders force us to live a calculated, considered life, where navigating around them forces us to confront our sick obsession with “health” and “full range of motion”. Fat Spreaders show us that never skipping dessert is a freedom most of us are too afraid to embrace, and reveal the cowardice and subservience of our own modern lives.